“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 30
White Halfoat’s, glinting drunkenly only inches away.
‘Why?’ Captain Flume managed to croak finally.
‘Why not?’ was Chief White Halfoat’s answer.
Each night after that, Captain Flume forced himself to keep awake as long as
possible. He was aided immeasurably by Hungry Joe’s nightmares. Listening so intently
to Hungry Joe’s maniacal howling night after night, Captain Flume grew to hate him and
began wishing that Chief White Halfoat would tiptoe up to his cot one night and slit his
throat open for him from ear to ear. Actually, Captain Flume slept like a log most nights
and merely dreamed he was awake. So convincing were these dreams of lying awake
that he woke from them each morning in complete exhaustion and fell right back to
sleep.
Chief White Halfoat had grown almost fond of Captain Flume since his amazing
metamorphosis. Captain Flume had entered his bed that night a buoyant extrovert and
left it the next morning a brooding introvert, and Chief White Halfoat proudly regarded
the new Captain Flume as his own creation. He had never intended to slit Captain
Flume’s throat open for him from ear to ear. Threatening to do so was merely his idea of
a joke, like dying of pneumonia, busting Colonel Moodus in the nose or challenging Doc
Daneeka to Indian wrestle. All Chief White Halfoat wanted to do when he staggered in
drunk each night was go right to sleep, and Hungry Joe often made that impossible.
Hungry Joe’s nightmares gave Chief White Halfoat the heebie-jeebies, and he often
wished that someone would tiptoe into Hungry Joe’s tent, lift Huple’s cat off his face and
slit his throat open for him from ear to ear, so that everybody in the squadron but
Captain Flume could get a good night’s sleep.
Even though Chief White Halfoat kept busting Colonel Moodus in the nose for General
Dreedle’s benefit, he was still outside the pale. Also outside the pale was Major Major,
the squadron commander, who had found that out the same time he found out that he
was squadron commander from Colonel Cathcart, who came blasting into the squadron
in his hopped-up jeep the day after Major Duluth was killed over Perugia. Colonel
Cathcart slammed to a screeching stop inches short of the railroad ditch separating the
nose of his jeep from the lopsided basketball court on the other side, from which Major
Major was eventually driven by the kicks and shoves and stones and punches of the
men who had almost become his friends.
‘You’re the new squadron commander,’ Colonel Cathcart had bellowed across the
ditch at him. ‘But don’t think it means anything, because it doesn’t. All it means is that
you’re the new squadron commander.’ And Colonel Cathcart had roared away as
abruptly as he’d come, whipping the jeep around with a vicious spinning of wheels that
sent a spray of fine grit blowing into Major Major’s face. Major Major was immobilized by
the news. He stood speechless, lanky and gawking, with a scuffed basketball in his long
hands as the seeds of rancor sown so swiftly by Colonel Cathcart took root in the
soldiers around him who had been playing basketball with him and who had let him
come as close to making friends with them as anyone had ever let him come before.
The whites of his moony eyes grew large and misty as his mouth struggled yearningly
and lost against the familiar, impregnable loneliness drifting in around him again like
suffocating fog.
Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters except Major Danby, Colonel
Cathcart was infused with the democratic spirit: he believed that all men were created
equal, and he therefore spurned all men outside Group Headquarters with equal fervor.
Nevertheless, he believed in his men. As he told them frequently in the briefing room, he
believed they were at least ten missions better than any other outfit and felt that any
who did not share this confidence he had placed in them could get the hell out. The only
way they could get the hell out, though, as Yossarian learned when he flew to visit ex-
P.F.C. Wintergreen, was by flying the extra ten missions.
‘I still don’t get it,’ Yossarian protested. ‘Is Doc Daneeka right or isn’t he?’
‘How many did he say?’
‘Forty.’